The New Older Woman

I was driving with my wife and seen an elder women driver driving a school bus with loads of school children. I was relating to my wife our experience in South Thailand when she was driving a car and the nearby cars were honking on her. The other male drivers seemed to be demoralized on seeing a woman, liberated driver confidently driving on a large and lonely freeway in metaphorically ‘an occupied’ Islamic territory. In my own observation, women school bus drivers have increased in number. I believe they will become good and motherly drivers to school children.

The phenomena of women working outside the home has coincided with the 21st century generation’s dream of independence and liberation. Their lives have differed markedly from their mothers and the contrast between the experiences of the new and the old generations will result in elder boomer women with a wider range of lifestyle choices and a different set of problems.

Until recently, people likes to portray older women as self-efficacious helpmates to their aging spouses, quint grandmothers and pathetic widows. With the coming of menopause in their late forties or early fifties, the most important job, bearing children had ended. Openly, they will held sexless, no longer desirable to men.

With the rise in divorce and an increasing demand for skilled office worker, many middle-aged women have entered the work force, becoming wage earners. Women past the age of 60 have lived much of their lives in the shadow of men.

The women in the next generation have grown up assuming that women work outside the home. They take for granted the economic and social equality for which feminist fought in the much early decades. They know that many marriages will not survive till death do us part.

And finally, they will age with more role models of active elderly women than the present generation has had and they will prove to be a powerful force in society.